There was a bookish man

The strange crime of William Jacques has rocked the sedate world of letters. But can greed alone explain why this privileged young man stole, doctored and sold hundreds of rare books from our great libraries?

There was a bookish man

The strange crime of William Jacques has rocked the sedate world of letters. But can greed alone explain why this privileged young man stole, doctored and sold hundreds of rare books from our great libraries?

Sunday 26 May 2002 06.45 EDT
First published on Sunday 26 May 2002 06.45 EDT

On the wall of the Great Hall of Jesus College in Cambridge hangs a small and rather glowering portrait of the eighteenth-century economist Thomas Malthus. A fellow there in the 1780s, he has fixed generations of undergraduates at formal suppers with his weary glare. In his right hand is a book, his forefinger slipped between the pages as a bookmark, as if the creation of this portrait were a necessary but tiresome distraction from his world of ideas.

Two centuries after Malthus another young economics student came to Jesus College. His name was William Simon Jacques and he was the son of a well-to-do farmer from Selby in North Yorkshire. It is tempting to imagine Jacques, during those tedious formal dinners, gazing admiringly at this portrait. Certainly it is now known that, at some point after he graduated in 1990, a copy of Malthus's seminal essay on the principle of population came into his possession. It was an original of the book, published in 1798, and worth £40,000. Surely only a genuine admirer would want a book that valuable? Perhaps not, for Jacques had not acquired the volume by virtue of his own economy; it had been stolen from the Cambridge University Library, along with works by Descartes, Galileo and Newton.

Last Thursday, at the Middlesex Guildhall Crown Court overlooking London's Parliament Square, Judge Derek Inman ordered that Jacques pay £310,000 in compensation and costs for his theft of the Malthus and of hundreds of other books like it, many of which were sold on through the great auction houses of Europe for huge financial gain. It was the latest hearing in 18 months of court proceedings which have laid bare perhaps the most systematic plundering of Britain's great libraries ever carried out by an individual.

The total value of the books Jacques stole is around £1.1 million. Many were damaged in an attempt to disguise their origins. Whole collections within those libraries have been devastated. Hundreds of the books have still not been recovered. Making the compensation and costs order Judge Inman said, 'You chose to contest a strong case against you and the jury found you guilty of stealing every single book and pamphlet with which you were charged.' In reply William Jacques said nothing.

In 1715, George I, eager to reward the University of Cambridge for its loyalty to the House of Hanover during the Jacobite uprising, decreed that the remarkable book collection of the late John Moore, Bishop of Ely, should go to the university's library. It was, and remains, the greatest benefaction in the library's history. Among the volumes were works by the astronomer Edmund Halley, the chemist Robert Boyle and, most importantly, by Sir Isaac Newton, including two editions of his Principia Mathematica , published in 1687. The Bishop of Ely's books became part of the Cambridge collection and travelled with the library as it expanded and grew, eventually filling the hefty brown-brick 1930s building which is its home today.

Although the library prides itself on the accessibility of most of its 160 kilometres of bookshelves, the bishop's books have always remained locked away, available only to those with clear scholarly need. In 1972 they became a part of the newly constituted Rare Books Department, with access restricted to a select number of staff.

Then in 1996, after two centuries on the shelves, the library realised that those two copies of the Principia had gone. Today Cambridge University Library admits that important books had actually started disappearing sometime in the early 1990s. Cambridge is famed in the antiquarian book trade for its shyness about lost books. Perhaps they were embarrassed at having failed as custodians of the nation's treasures. Perhaps they really hadn't noticed the extent of the problem. Whatever the reason they decided to call in the police only when the two Newtons and a work by Galileo (combined value, more than £300,000) were discovered missing. 'Readers would ask to see these books,' says Brian Jenkins, head of Rare Books since the Seventies 'and they would not be there.'

Cambridgeshire police interviewed staff and searched for suspicious finger prints but none were found and no arrests were made. The inquiry lay dormant until a February morning in 1999 when a student at the London School of Economics called Carl Williams stumbled into the premises of Bloomsbury Book Auctions in north London. Williams is known in the antiquarian book business as 'a runner', a book dealer who does not trade from a shop but instead picks up a volume in one place and immediately moves it over to another dealer for a swift and, ideally, profitable sale. That day Williams was wondering how he was going to raise the funds he needed to pay his course fees and hadn't intended to go to a book auction at all. But he was passing BBA and popped in anyway.

He was delighted when he spotted a work of philosophy called The Pure Logic of Quality by William Jevons, published in 1864. 'It's a very, very rare book,' Williams says now. 'I'd only ever seen it before in an institutional setting.' He joined the bidding and won, taking the book away for £120.

Later that day, Williams took the book to the offices of Pickering and Chatto, an antiquarian book dealers near Hanover Square to which he had been selling for about 18 months. Jolyon Hudson, the tall, slightly dishevelled managing director, took a look at the small volume, in its binding of deep blue. Without explaining why, he asked Williams to leave it with him for a day or two. He and a colleague examined the book. There was a shadow on the front cover where a label might once have been. The spine had been changed. A piece had been ripped out of one of the front sheets and it had been crudely patched. 'At the very least this was a de-accessioned library book,' Hudson says. 'You've got to ask yourself when you see something like this, why take off the labels?' He was convinced the page had been ripped to remove a blind stamp, an embossing mark that gives away its origins. Not that Hudson had much trouble indentifying where it had come from. He believed he was a member of the very library that had once owned this book.

A few streets away in St James's Square, stands the London Library. It was founded in 1841, holds more than a million volumes and has 8,500 members who pay an annual subscription. 'It's a proper library full of proper books,' says Beryl Bainbridge who has been a member for many years. 'If you're writing about the Crimean War you don't want a modern fellow on it. You want something of the time and they have it.'

It now seemed to Hudson that somebody had been wandering those gloomy Victorian corridors in search of more than literary treasure. 'I phoned Alan Bell, the chief librarian, and told him to have a look at his political economy section.' Hudson's hunch was right. Within hours Bell had identified the book as one of theirs. Carl Williams was devastated. 'I felt guilty in a way, as if I was knowingly handling stolen goods though of course I wasn't.' Hudson says Williams need not worry. 'Carl behaved impeccably.'

Hudson then went back to Bloomsbury Book Auctions and asked Rupert Powell where the book had come from. It had been 'consigned' to auction by a young man called William Jacques. 'He had been dealing with us since 1992 or 1993,' Powell says. 'He was just a smartly dressed young man.' He wore pin-stripe. He spoke quietly. He didn't suggest great knowledge of the business but as time passed themes did develop.

Little is known about Jacques, who was born in March 1969. He once worked as a chartered accountant. His former senior tutor at Jesus College, Ian DuQuesnay, has described him as a 'competent but not outstanding student'. At the porter's lodge they would say only that he was 'not much liked'.

'Economics was a favourite subject of his,' Rupert Powell says of the books Jacques sold him. 'As to value, it would vary. Virtually all of them were single lots which meant they went for more than £50. There were a couple of four-figure books, nothing above that.' What at first had been infrequent visits, became more regular over time. Powell says now that his company sold hundreds of Jacques titles. 'There was nothing with hindsight that indicated anything was up. Yes, all indication of where they had come from had been removed but that isn't necessarily suspicious because there are so many ex-library books legitimately on the market.'

Jolyon Hudson questions this, pointing out that he spotted it was a London Library volume within minutes. 'Hudson is a member of the London Library and he deals with far fewer titles than we do,' Powell responds.

Powell and Alan Bell of the London Library now looked through the catalogue for the auction in which Williams had bought the Jevons book. All the titles consigned by Jacques had been stolen from the London Library. Powell telephoned Jacques and asked him if he'd stop by the office to resolve the issue. 'When I told him about our concerns over the Jevons he was very surprised, very calm, very polite. He said he had acquired it from a middle-aged man at Portobello Market whom he'd never seen before or since and that he'd paid cash.' A couple of days later Jacques sent an unsigned fax to BBA, from his office at Shell UK, where he was employed in the tax accounting department. It laid out the terms upon which he was willing to cooperate, including that his identity should remain unknown to the libraries. 'It seemed a wholly inappropriate thing to do,' Powell says now, with a bookseller's delicious understatement.

Soon auction houses all over Britain and Europe were being alerted to Jacques's activities, along with lists of books missing from the London Library. Christie's in London realised it had dealt with books from Jacques on nine separate occasions since October 1996. In Berlin the house of Galleria Gerda Bassenge discovered they had sold books from Jacques, most of them rather esoteric German Reformation pamphlets. The London Library had once had a great collection of such pamphlets. In Munich the house of Zisska and Kistner discovered they had 13 titles on the warning list, waiting for a forthcoming auction. They also had a number of items stolen from the Cambridge University Library as did BBA.

The case was put into the hands of Detective Constable Paul Howitt of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary. Tall, broad-shouldered and bearded, Howitt admits he is not a bookish sort. When he gets the time to read, his favourite author is Wilbur Smith. He had been involved with serious crime for most of his career: murder and robbery, fraud and deception but this was a very different kind of crime. 'Initially the case was very hard to get into,' he says. 'Frankly one book looks very much like any other. It's only on the say so of people who've got great knowledge that you can distinguish value.'

Jacques wasn't about to help out. In April 1999 he was interviewed at a police station in Cambridge. 'I found him to be a very educated man and a very arrogant man,' DC Howitt says. 'And a bit of a loner. He lived in a bed sit.' The first police interview was hardly revealing. Jacques, apparently oblivious to the warnings circulating Europe, said he had dealt with only one auction house. He said he had come by the books honestly. 'I think he thought we could never prove the provenance of these books and that was his downfall,' DC Howitt says. Jacques was released on bail.

Later that month the man who lived in a bedsit transferred £360,000 that he held with the Jyske Bank in London to a branch in Gibraltar. He then sent a fax to Gibraltar marked 'urgent', ordering them to transfer the money to the Banco Metropolitano in Havana, Cuba and insisted that they should not attempt to contact him. Within days he had flown to Cuba to be with his cash, firing off a letter of resignation to Shell as he went. Later, more books would be found in a locker at the company.

Despite being in a country which has no extradition treaty with Britain, Jacques appears to have thought himself too exposed in Havana. He transferred $20,000 to a bank in Santa Clara, an industrial town in the island's heartland famous only as the home of the memorial to Che Guevara. Apparently now convinced he was beyond the reach of justice he sent a letter back to the police via his solicitors. It listed a series of safety deposit boxes that he held with banks in London, York and Cambridge. One by one the safety deposit boxes were taken from the banks. Those in London were removed to the London Library for opening in the presence of Alan Bell. Those in York and Cambridge were removed to the Cambridge University Library where they were opened in the presence of Brian Jenkins. 'Essentially for me this case turned into a long trudge through the rain carrying books for identifications,' DC Howitt says. Inside those boxes were dozens and dozens of hugely valuable titles, among them works by Thomas Paine, Galileo and Robert Boyle.

But the most striking box was the one in Cambridge. Inside it, alongside that £40,000 copy of the Thomas Malthus, were the two missing editions of Newton's Principia. 'The police were happy for us,' Brian Jenkins says. 'But I think they were also rather amused when I bent down and kissed the book.' They were undamaged. It appears that Jacques's ambition had outstripped his ability to sell. There was no way he could find a buyer on the open market for books like the Principia, or the works of Galileo or Malthus.

Some of the volumes were wrapped in newspa pers dating back to 1993. The police also found what DC Howitt refers to as 'a ringing kit', the tools to disguise the books. There were ancient sheets of paper for use as new folios and for patches as well as bindings and backs. It was the most incriminating evidence against him.

Why Jacques flew back to Britain nobody knows. He has never explained himself. During police interviews at the end of 1999 and early in 2000 he stuck to his story: that he was a chartered accountant whose hobby was old books, that he had come by them honestly, that he hadn't made that much out of them, that it was all a mystery. DC Howitt was less than convinced. In the course of an investigation lasting almost two years, the policeman travelled across Britain and Germany, following Jacques's complex book trail and even flew to Cuba to track the money.

Jacques was unimpressed by his efforts. In February of last year when he was brought to trial on 19 counts of theft he challenged every single book that was brought up in front of him - and there were dozens - claiming it was his and honestly come by. After five arduous weeks he was found guilty and immediately sent to prison where he has spent the past year.

He appealed against the verdict twice, unsuccessfully. Shortly before a second trial covering two more counts was due to start last month, Jacques changed his plea to guilty. The thin delicate-looking figure with close-cropped hair who had stood in the dock a year before was a changed man now. He had bulked up thanks to the prison gym and wore his long hair in a pony tail, tied back with a blue ribbon.

The prosecution encouraged the judge to be enthusiastic in his sentencing. 'Underpinning what he did was greed,' said Karim Khalil, for the crown, 'Albeit it hidden behind a shabby cloak of respectability.' In mitigation his defence barrister, Annette Henry, described him as a 'hugely humiliated' man who had 'shattered' his personal and professional life and 'stripped' himself of a future career. In a lame attempt at levity Henry then pointed out that 'the book - or should I say books - have been thrown at him.' He was sentenced to four years in prison. 'You were a man of good character,' the judge said. 'You had the benefit of a Cambridge education but you have not used those advantages. You are clearly a very dishonest young man.'

There is little sympathy for Jacques. 'What he did is equivalent to daubing paint on the Parthenon,' his senior tutor, Ian DuQuesnay, told the press on hearing the verdict. 'I don't like the idea that someone's ripping away our heritage,' says Carl Williams. 'It's theft and it's vandalism and it's a filthy thing to do.' Jolyon Hudson agrees. 'I wouldn't mind so much if they'd just been stolen and resold. It's the destruction of the provenances that distresses me. It's like taking out the crown jewels and cutting them up.'

While a lot of books have been recovered, mysteries still remain. Although Jacques was found guilty of theft, he was never actually charged with removing the books from the libraries because there was no proof he had done so. While the police and Alan Bell, now retired, do believe he personally lifted the London Library books, Brian Jenkins at Cambridge University Library insists that he could not have removed the most valuable titles from there. 'That leaves only one possibility,' Jenkins says. 'A member of staff was involved and that is hugely distressing for us.' At both libraries security systems have been improved. There are closed-circuit cameras at the London Library. Passes must be shown. Members must be buzzed in. The genteel world of letters has had a reality check.

For all the outrage and distress and dismay, what Jacques did is not without precedent. 'I was once told that every great book has been plundered at least once in its life,' Jolyon Hudson says. Rome's great libraries were built by Asinius Pollio and Augustus; Henry VIII ransacked the monasteries; Napoleon stole nearly 2,400 books for his exile on Elba; Hitler enshrined the plundering of libraries in state law. But William Jacques didn't want to read any of the books. He just wanted to sell them. Indeed it turns out that his tastes were rather closer to that of the policeman who pursued him so doggedly. Throughout that long first trial last year William Jacques came to court each day clutching a single thick volume. A novel by Wilbur Smith.

Stolen books

I. Newton Principia mathematica (1687) (two copies) £100,000

J. Kepler Astronomia nova (1609) £65,000

J. Kepler Tabulae rudolphinae (1627) £14,000

G. Galileo Sidereus nuncius (1610) £180,000

G. Galileo Dialogo (1632) £28,000

T. Malthus An essay on the principle of population (1798) £40,000

N. Copernicus Astronomia instaurata (1617) £7,500

C. Huygens Traite de la lumiere (1690) £15,000

A. Smith An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (1776) £2,000